While it may not affect you, a paper published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics yesterday is calling for some nasty nasty behavior from the planet as the climate change by the year 2100 including “superstorms” and rising seas that will make New York, Miami, and San Francisco uninhabitable by the turn of the next century.
Truly frightening climate change predictions
The study’s lead author was the former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies as well as a climate scientist, James Hansen. He and the 18 co-authors are calling for “superstorms” being formed in the Atlantic ocean that would could hurl boulders from the sea floor hundreds of a feet into the air. What’s even more frightening is that he believes that this could happen with only a two degree Celsius rise in global temperatures.
That is not an arbitrary number as the Paris conference on climate change and global warming saw nations agreeing to keeping temperatures from rising by two degrees, but, and here’s the problem the technology that is needed to accomplish that doesn’t yet exist and the group of authors questions whether it’s even scientifically possible going forward into the future.
“Given the inertia of the climate and energy systems, and the grave threat posed by continued high emissions, the matter is urgent and calls for emergency cooperation among nations,” they wrote, in the paper’s conclusion. That paper was just published yesterday, but the authors had already posted it online last summer because of the perceived urgent need ahead of the Paris talks.
That online publication caught a lot of flak as it wasn’t peer-reviewed and now that it was been, it’s a little less catastrophic but still paints a scary view of the near future.
Not even a little bit cheery the paper
According to Hansen, the cold meltwater from Greenland is already causing the weakening of the AMOC, an internal current in the Atlantic that does it’s best to keep the world a temperate place, with the weakening the temperate nature of the Atlantic could see cold waters in the Arctic with a rise in temperatures in the southern latitudes causing truly horrible storms and scary weather systems.
“I believe we are already watching the beginning of this cooling, southeast of Greenland,” Hansen says. “In that case, extra cooling and extra warming along the United States East Coast are not natural fluctuations. The warm water is the reason that [Hurricane] Sandy retained hurricane-force winds up to the New York City area.”
“Have we passed a point of no return? I doubt it, but it’s conceivable,” he adds. “But if we wait until the real world reveals itself clearly, it may be too late to avoid sea-level rise of several meters and loss of all coastal cities.”
Hansen is clearly concerned and this paper and subsequent papers and studies are precisely the reason he left NASA. The world he envisions is nothing short of truly cataclysmic, near biblical stuff. It’s also an important call for all the nations of the world to get their houses in order as well as that of other nations with whom they have close relations.
Does this mean that Hansen and his colleagues have everything right. Who knows, but know this, you better hope not. Yes, it’s dark and something out of a movie but it’s a future that is truly frightening and backed up by the contributions of nearly 20 respected experts in a number of fields including meteorology, geology, climate science, oceanography and a number of others.
Is Hanson screaming out to be noticed and wake people up? He most certainly his but it’s also quite clear that he’s genuinely scared of this foreseen future.
